


To Not Exceed the Limit

by donutsweeper



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mission Fic, Pre-Canon, Relationship Reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-13 04:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13563282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/donutsweeper/pseuds/donutsweeper
Summary: Things that Clay had been careful not to see come to light at the worst, or perhaps best, moment.





	To Not Exceed the Limit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tommygirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tommygirl/gifts).



_Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes a day. Wisdom consists of not exceeding the limit._ — Elbert Hubbard

* * *

As their commanding officer, Clay had known he should have put a stop to it. The only problem was he hadn't been exactly sure what "it" was or what, if anything, there there was that he could do about what was happening. What he had known was that he had a long range eliminations specialist who barely talked along with a communications and technology specialist who never shut up and that something had been going on between them that Clay had been very careful not to see or think about too much. 

He should have done something.

But he didn't.

And now it might be too late. Both for him to have done anything about it and, well, for Jensen in general.

They had been on what should have been a routine op, or as routine as they ever seemed to get these days, anyway. The target had been a minor weapons' trafficker in the asscrack of nowhere. It had all seemed so simple. Get in, get Jensen to work his magic to get a copy of the shipping manifests, get out, and shoot anything that stood in their way. Piece of cake.

Except, as it turned out, the trafficker was less on the 'minor' side of things and more along the line of 'dabbles in guns and things that go boom while spending most of his time developing poisons and other shit that will fuck people up if not outright kill them in three minutes flat' which would have been a fucking nice thing to know before Jensen triggered some kind of booby trap and got sprayed with some shit while working or when the building started sealing itself when some of the team were still inside.

Jensen had managed to finish the job without giving any sign over the radio that things had gone south. Clay himself only began to realize that something was off when Pooch and Roque stumbled on an entire network of labs hidden under the building and started cursing up a storm over the comms, bitching about bad intel and what they'd found. Jensen had commandeered the channel immediately and ordered them to grab any gas masks and portable O2 tanks they could get their hands on before getting hell out of there ASAP; he'd made it sound like he was relaying Clay's message and then done _something_ to the comms to prevent Clay from being able to issue any kind of counterorder.

As it was, it had turned out to be a damned good thing Pooch and Roque had gotten out of there when they did because they'd barely gotten back to the main floor when klaxons and sirens started going off and, from what they'd said later, it sounded like they hadn't made it much further before emergency doors started slamming shut around the complex.

Clay had been already outside, doing a sweep of the outer buildings, and Cougar was safe since he was well out of the way in his sniper's nest, but once everyone realized what was happening it was utter chaos with not only the Losers, but gunrunners, scientists, and other random flunkies and hired hands all trying to get the hell out of Dodge all at the same time. 

The ensuing firefight had been brutal. The trafficker's people, and there were a lot of them, were firing indiscriminately, not caring who they hit. Cougar did his best to take them out as cleanly as he could from, but someone set off a smoke bomb which compromised his sight lines. Despite not being able to see much himself, Clay could hear Roque's HK416 and Pooch's Remington 870, both of which stood out against the Glocks that the guards seemed to favor. 

Between the Losers trying to take out the hired guns and said hired guns shooting anything and everything that moved, it wasn't long before his team were the only ones still standing, although it was possible some survivors used the chaos to slip away and escape. Honestly, Clay didn't care if they did; his orders had been to obtain the data, which Jensen had reported accomplishing prior to mucking with the comms, not hunting down a bunch of possibly somewhat innocent civilians.

Clay finally had eyes on some of his men, Roque and Pooch, and they'd just started doing a sweep and taking stock when their radios clicked to life. "Reconvene at the secondary rendezvous point." Jensen's voice was raspy and oddly strained, like he'd just chain smoked a dozen really cheap cigars on an empty stomach and was trying not to throw up. "Bring the O2 tanks and masks."

_What the fuck?_

Pooch was hefting something bulky, probably the tanks Jensen had asked for, but Clay didn't stop to check to see what it was. Without exchanging a word, the three of them joined up and took off for the meeting point at a fast clip in their usual positions: Clay on point, Pooch in the center and Roque guarding their rear. About two thirds of the way there Cougar slipped out of the shadows to join up with them, falling into place with Pooch.

A half a click to the south of the rendezvous point was the husk of a tree, all that remained of it after what looked like a lightning strike a few seasons back. Leaning against the tree, bent over and gasping for air, was Jensen.

"Jensen!" Pooch shouted as they ran up just as Clay demanded, "Sitrep, corporal!"

"Fucker had boobytraps," Jensen wheezed in response, pushing away from the tree to sag against Cougar. "Some kind of gas shit. Surprised me and took a lungfull."

Cougar slung Jensen's arm over his shoulder, immediately taking most of his weight. "Pulse is racing, boss. Breathing's wrong too."

"Pooch," Clay began to order, but Pooch was already moving, pulling the tank and mask out.

"I need to get this on you, Jay." Jensen never reacted well to sudden movements around his face, so Pooch's warning was for everyone's benefit.

Pooch waited until Jensen nodded and then did a quick assessment before taking the gas masks, O2 tanks and the roll of duct tape that he always had on him and jerry-rigged something that might help Jensen breathe easier. "What can you tell us about the gas?" Pooch asked as he worked. "How was it released? Can you describe it? Odor, color, anything so we can figure out what you got dosed with?"

Jensen nodded, sagging even further against Cougar; he was obviously having difficulty staying upright. "Can do better than that. Was from a sprayer. Upper right pocket. Found a case with preloaded syringes. Lower left pocket. Think it might be antidote or counter-toxin or whatever. Docs can test to make sure."

That was smart thinking. Frequently, people who worked with poisons kept antidotes on hand to use in case something went wrong and they accidentally exposed themselves. "Good work, Jensen." Clay turned to Pooch asking, "He stable enough to move him?"

"I think so. And with his breathing sounding the way it is, the quicker we can get him treatment the better. Just, let me just secure this first."

Once the mask was in place Roque stepped up. "It'll be quickest if I carry him."

Cougar looked reluctant to release his charge, but after Jensen murmured something too soft for Clay to hear he nodded and stepped back. 

Roque grumbled, "Don't get used to this. I'm not hauling your lazy ass around more than I have to," as he picked up Jensen. Cougar grabbed the O2 tank and the four of them took off for the secondary rendezvous, their truck carefully concealed under camo and netting, at just under a run.

All in all, Clay figured it was less than an hour from when Jensen was exposed to the gas to them arriving at base and his being admitted to the hospital. Thank god for Pooch and his aversion to speed limits and ability to go off road, because even with the oxygen Jensen's lips had been blue by the time they got him on a gurney and he was being wheeled away.

They'd handed over sprayer and syringes, made their reports and then… waited. The longer they waited the more on edge everyone became, especially Cougar. Normally one for stillness and quiet, Cougar was pacing and muttering to himself. If Clay wasn't mistaken, from the tone and few words he could catch, Cougar was going through all the things he was going to do and say to Jensen the next time he saw him, particularly if he didn't pull through. Jensen was going to have a lot to answer for when he was better (and he _would_ be better, Clay refused to even consider any other outcome).

Eventually, after way too many fucking hours of doing nothing but cooling their heels, a tired looking nurse came into the waiting room, "Corporal Jensen's unit?"

"That's us," Clay said, as they all got to their feet. 

Looking them over, she turned to Clay after spotting his rank. "If you'll come with me, Colonel?"

Roque surged forward, only to be held back by Pooch while Cougar merely crossed his arms and glared.

"We're a team, ma'am, we'll go together if that's alright with you." Clay made sure to make it a statement, not a question. They were going, that was final.

Other than a raised eyebrow the nurse didn't react, so Clay figured she was used to the military mindset of never leaving a man by himself.

The doctor she led them to looked almost competent, which made a nice change from the usual asshats that stitched them up post-mission. "I'm Doctor Abrams, I'm the lead physician on Corporal Jensen's case," she began without fanfare. "The lab is still analyzing the evidence you brought back, but the results of the tests they've run so far are promising. I must say, your man displayed excellent forethought in obtaining both the device that dosed him and what appears to be the counter-toxin."

"He's always been too smart for his own good," Clay groused, he couldn't help it, it was an ingrained response, before asking the question he knew they all wanted the answer to, "So how is he?"

"The poison manifested itself as a," the doctor began before stopping, raising her hand up and shaking her head. "And you don't care about the specifics right now, do you? Boiled down, Corporal Jensen's breathing was adversely affected and continued to degrade, so to ease the strain on his body and his lungs we decided he needed to be on a ventilator and therefore, for his own benefit, to temporarily put him in a medical coma to prevented him from becoming agitated while intubated."

Choosing to ignore the small, wounded noise Cougar made at that declaration he asked instead, "Can we see him?"

"Of course, right this way."

Jensen looked… hell, Jensen looked terrible. In all the time Clay had known him, Jensen had always seemed larger than life. Vibrant. Boisterous. Loud. Annoying as hell, sure, but Jensen was Jensen and had somehow slotted into the team in a way that made it seem like he'd always been there. Jensen had gotten hurt before, they all had, it was the nature of what they did, but this time, lying there, he looked young. Vulnerable. Like they might lose him.

Shit.

Roque cursed long and low under his breath while Pooch muttered a soft, "Damn it, Jay."

Typical of the man, Cougar didn't say a word. He just pulled a chair over to Jensen's bedside before grabbing his free hand and holding it tightly between his own. He tore his gaze from Jensen for a moment to glare at Clay, as if daring him to mention regs or DADT or to say anything negative about it at all.

There was a time and a place for that kind of shit and a hospital sure as hell wasn't it. Besides, Clay might not _like_ having two members of his team in some kind of relationship, but since neither Pooch nor Roque seemed surprised by it it probably had been going on for some time and hadn't noticeably interfered with their work, so who was he to complain about it? Sure he could report it, and technically he should, but where the hell was he going to get another sniper as good as Cougar or comm and techs guy as good as Jensen? It wasn't going to happen.

If he'd been a little more on the ball he might have tried to prevent them from getting together in the first place or at least have put a stop to it when it was in its early stages, but not now. Especially not now. He just nodded and shifted so he covered the door a bit more to prevent anyone from wandering in and seeing something they'd have to report. Roque's glare lessened a bit then and he offered Clay one of those 'I guess you're not an asshole so now I won't have to gut you' smiles of his before slipping into the hall and taking position just to the right of the door, putting himself on first watch.

Clay turned to Pooch. "It looks like we're going to be here for a while. Why don't you go on a supply run and pick up everything we might need for a few days. You may as well call Jolene while you're out to let her know we're back on friendly soil, but that's all," he added quickly, because Jolene would never keep news like this to herself and it was Clay's job to inform Jensen's family and he didn't want to have to make that call until he had actual news to give them, until they knew if Jensen would make it or not. "I don't want to word getting out until we know more." 

"Right." Pooch nodded, understanding what Clay wasn't saying. He patted Cougar on the shoulder, but didn't seem surprised not to get any kind of acknowledgement in response. "Be back as soon as I can." 

Time dragged in the hospital. The nurses came by every few hours to check on Jensen and run more tests. As his commander and medical proxy the doctors talked over various treatments options with him, but, fuck, Clay wasn't a doctor, all this medical shit went way over his head.

"So let me see if I have this right. Even with the ventilator, he has bilateral basal crackles in his lungs," Clay parroted back, not bothering to ask for further explanations even though he still wasn't entirely sure what those were because he was pretty sure they'd already dumbed it down as much as they could and still have it resemble English. "Which that means there's fluid in there and you haven't been able to stop it from getting worse. The traditional treatments you normally do in cases like this don't appear to be working, so you want permission to dose him with some of the liquid that was in the syringes that Jensen recovered since your tests seem to indicate they contain counter-toxins."

"Yes." Straight and to the point, Clay appreciated that about Doctor Abrams.

"But you can't guarantee it really is a counter-toxin or that he won't have some kind of bad reaction to it."

"No, unfortunately we can't."

Clay looked at Cougar and tilted his head. Technically, he was the one who was supposed to be making these kind of decisions, but if the last twelve hours had shown him anything it was that Cougar knew Jensen a hell of a lot better than he did and probably had a better idea of what Jensen would want in a situation like this. There was a moment's pause and then Cougar nodded. "Do it," Clay told the doctor. "I don't see that we really have any other choice."

The doctor handed Clay some paperwork to sign, which gave him an excuse to avoid acknowledging the sympathetic looks Roque and Pooch gave Cougar. _This better work,_ he thought to himself as he scrawled his John Hancock on the line absolving the doctors in case the 'experimental treatment' (aka administering a dose of liquid found in the syringe) either failed to help or made things worse.

The Losers had been relegated to the waiting room again so the dose's effects could be carefully monitored. They didn't bother with coffee or anything that in theory could distract them; they stayed focused on the matter at hand, waiting for word, and it was a long two hours before they got any.

When Doctor Abrams appeared it didn't take any special skills to see how relieved she looked. "It's working," she said, without any preamble. "If he continues to improve we should be able to wean him off the ventilator in a few hours and if that goes well then we'll wake him up in the morning."

Pooch whooped at the news and Roque slapped Clay on the back so hard it was all Clay could do to stay on his feet. Cougar meanwhile, well Cougar just stood there with this soft, small smile that normally would be ridiculously out of place on the face of any member of black ops team, but it fit the moment perfectly.

Later, when the doctors cleared them out of Jensen's room so they could remove the ventilator, Clay took the opportunity to order Roque and Pooch to get out of the hospital to go sleep in a real bed for a change and told them, in no uncertain terms, that unless they heard otherwise they better not even consider coming back before morning. He knew better than to send Cougar away. In theory he could, but rank only protected him so much and between Cougar and Jensen there were about a million ways they could murder him and/or make his life miserable if they put their minds to it, so he didn't bother to even try. 

As it was, as the night wore on Jensen continued to improve and Clay couldn't be sorry both he and Cougar were there to see it. Jensen began to look less gray, and without as many machines around him he seem more like he was just sleeping and less like he some sort of corpse being kept alive to be experimented on further. (The fact that Clay even _thought_ about mad scientists and strange experiments was entirely Jensen's fault and a result of all those movies they'd watched in the name of 'team bonding' and Clay only hoped that after Jensen's run-in with actual poison gas boobytraps he might have lost his taste for that whole movie genre, but Clay didn't hold out much hope on that front, this was _Jensen,_ they were talking about after all.)

Once the doctors' were happy with his progress they began the process of easing him off the drugs they had him on so he could regain consciousness naturally. Which, unfortunately, meant they had no real timeline on when he'd awaken. Even though nothing much was happening, Clay texted Roque and Pooch to keep them up to date with Jensen's condition as he and Cougar settled in to wait some more. 

As Jensen started showing more and more signs of waking up soon - Clay was unfortunately far too familiar with those signs in his men having bunked with all of them in close quarters a ridiculous number of times - Cougar grew more and more tense, throwing uneasy looks at Clay out of the corner of his eye. Luckily, Clay wasn't an idiot so before things could get out of hand he said, "I'm going to go get us some coffee," and got the hell out of there. He figured the excuse of going on a caffeine run was as good as any to give Cougar some alone time with Jensen.

He didn't go far or take too long; he wasn't about to linger in the canteen when one his men was hurt and the other distracted and they might need someone watching their backs, but once back on Jensen's floor he did stroll down the hall slower than he normally would when returning to the room. Hearing voices inside, he lingered just out of sight instead of going straight in.

"You going to go all growly on me because I got hurt again?" It was Jensen, his voice sounding rough and painful, but, with Jensen being Jensen, that didn't stop him from talking. "Okay, glare much? I couldn't compromise the mission, you know that. And I didn't have eyes on any of the guys so I didn't know - I mean, what if there were more of those booby traps? I had to make sure they got out of there. Come on, please, you know I had to."

"What if the syringes did not contain the counter-toxin?"

"But it did. Cougs, don't go there. You know there's no guarantees in this job." There was a pause and Clay thought about breaking up their little moment by poking his head in, but Jensen continued before he'd made up his mind. "So how fucked are we? Oh, don't give me that look, I'm not stupid and neither is Clay. Him leaving you here with me by yourself? There's no way that means he didn't figure it out. We knew he would one of these days. I mean, we could try to spin some kind of story about us, but I don't think he'll buy it. Which leaves what, straight up dishonorable discharge? One of us getting transferred? Pooch and Roque didn't give a shit when they found out, so I don't think we gotta worry about a blanket party or some kind of friendly fire incident, do you?"

Fucking hell, Clay wasn't surprised that's where Jensen's head went when it came to being outed, but there was no way any kind of shit like that was going to happen under his command. That settled it, while he'd wanted to give Jensen and Cougar some time alone, he had to nip this insanity in the butt right here and right now. 

"Jensen, you're looking better," he opened with as he strolled in, offering the second coffee to Cougar. "Black, two sugars."

"Thanks, boss." The defiantness from earlier was gone; Cougar took the cup carefully, without meeting his eyes. 

"Um. So. Colonel. This isn't what it looks like," Jensen began before Clay cut him off.

"You mean this _isn't_ a situation where a member of my team failed to follow rules and regulations and did _not_ report a mission compromising injury? Because that's what it looks like to me."

"No, I mean yes, I mean…. What?"

"You should have reported the incident to me the moment you set off that booby trap, corporal. You had no way of knowing whether or not you'd be able to make it to the rendezvous. Without any other data we might have assumed you'd been captured and a rescue would have involved a completely different strategic plan than a retrieval."

Jensen gaped at him for a moment before clearing his throat. "Right. Yeah. I just. Sorry, Colonel."

"Don't let it happen again," Clay ordered, giving Jensen his best glare before turning it on Cougar. "Now, if I remember correctly, we were supposed to inform the doctors when you woke up so they could do their tests, but I need to get some caffeine in my system before I can hope to understand all that medical jargon they're going to be spouting when they get here. However, since Jensen's awake it means he's going to be talking, and it is far too early to deal with that, so I'm going to go find a place where I can drink it in peace. I'll be back at 0600," he said after glancing at his watch; that would give them almost 15 minutes. It wasn't much, but considering the nurse would be checking in about then anyway, it was the best that he could do. 

Without waiting for a response from either of them, he turned and headed out. A large group of medical personnel approached, trying to navigate their way down the hall with a gurney and various equipment so he leaned up against the wall to let them pass, taking the time to get a lay of the land. There was a set of chairs in a little alcove in the corner at the end of the hall, he could sit there and keep an eye on the door and make sure his men were all right and not caught unawares or disturbed before they were ready. 

Once everyone had gone past he took a quick look in the room as he headed for the chairs to make sure his men were squared away. Cougar was leaning back in his chair, laughing at whatever Jensen was going on about, looking lighter than Clay could remember seeing him before and Clay couldn't help but smile himself. Yeah, his men were all right and, despite one being in the hospital, probably better than they'd been in a long time. 


End file.
